A Review Of Truman Capote's Pornoviolence

It is human nature to occasionally feel the need to break society’s norms. Breaking the law often involves violence and is a form of breaking the norm. It leads people to be driven or drawn towards the concept. In Tom Wolfe’s essay- “Pornoviolence”- Wolfe makes a valuable argument that people are becoming more desensitized towards violence as a whole because of how books, movies, tabloids, and TV utilize brutality to grab viewers attention. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Capote retells the gruesome event of a family who was murdered in Holcomb, Kansas. Wolfe implies that Capote promotes porno-violence in the book by delaying the specifics of the deaths that occur. Capote quickly reveals who the killers are and who they killed, but postpones

However, Capote does not use this technique: “ Instead, the books suspense is based largely on a totally new idea in detective stories: the promise of gory details, and the withholding of them until the end” (Wolfe 4). Within in the first 50 pages of the book, Capote begins to reveal the victims of the crime: “ Now, on this final day of her life, Mrs. Clutter hung in the closet the calico housedress she had been wearing…” (Capote 30). As well as the killers: “ To Perry, it seemed as though Dick were muttering jubilant mumbojumbo. They left the highway, sped through a deserted Holcomb… ‘This is it, this has to be it’” (Capote 57). The audience knows that a crime has already been committed and that the Clutter family wasn’t able to prevent it. Capote is overly vague when he reveals that the crimes have been committed. People want to know the full story, especially when it involves a serious topic. Capote knows this. He quickly brushes over the victims and killers, without mentioning what exactly occurred between them. This drives the reader's curiosity to continue reading for that horrific

She has them all the time, terrible nosebleeds, and that’s all it is.’ ‘ There's too much blood. There’s blood on the walls. You didn’t really look’ ” (Capote 60). Using the small image of blood to describe the scene gives the audience one of their first clues about what exactly happened; but Capote does not begin to mention the full details of the murders. Most people, hopefully, will never have to experience what it is like being in a murder scene which is possibly why they find it so interesting to read about the details of the Clutter’s murder case. They are intrigued through the melancholy and suspenseful atmosphere: “The new pornography depicts practitioners acting out another, murkier drive: people starving teeth in, ripping guts open…” (Wolfe 2). Capote recognizes that aggressive matters tend maintain the reader's attention span and utilizes that. Capote waits 184 pages later to finally reveal the appalling details of the murders: “ I handed the knife to Dick...Then I aimed the gun. The room just exploded. Went blue. Just blazed up” (Capote 244). The scene Capote creates is eerie and gory. Yet, it was a climax in the book that was delayed. It was a scene readers had been motivated all along to learn about. The reader's main focus was revolved around how specifically the killers committed the horrible crime, rather than how they were